U.S. Pat. No. 7,954,439 shows an apparatus for transplanting seedlings grown in nursery trays having a plurality of side-by side rows of seedling cells, which apparatus plants the seedlings uniformly spaced apart even though not all cells in the nursery tray has seedlings. The apparatus picks up an entire row of seedlings from a tray, which row may have gaps between seedlings, transfers the seedlings to a mechanism which eliminates gaps between seedlings, and then delivers them to a gap-up belt assembly which discharges the seedlings one at time to the ground with a desired spacing between the seedlings. The seedlings have a root ball, stem, and leaves or foliage. Some plants have a jagged edge leaf. During plant extraction from the tray the leaves of adjacent rows of seedlings may have a tendency to interlock together. This results in a situation where the plant foliage has to be forcibly separated. Under normal conditions with average plants there usually is not much damage to the plant foliage. However, with young tender plants they are sometimes stripped of many or all of their leaves, and thus the planted seedlings fail to thrive. In the apparatus shown in U.S. Pat. No. 7,954,439 a pair of separation spears are employed to separate the leaves of adjacent rows of seedlings, and after they have been fully extended between the rows of seedlings they are “bumped” or “jittered” to ensure that the seedlings are in the extraction spears.